The Fertility of the Unfit eBook

a criminal, a pauper, or a drunkard—­improvidence
and defective inhibition—­ensure that his
fertility will be unrestrained, except by the checks
of biological law. And it now comes about that
the good citizen, who curtails his family, has the
defective offspring of the bad citizen thrown upon
his hands to support; and the humanitarian zeal, born
of Christian sentiment, which is at flood-tide to-day,
ensures that all the defectives born to the world
shall not only be nursed and tended, but shall have
the same opportunities of the highest possible fertility
enjoyed by their defective progenitors.

A higher and nobler human happiness is attainable
only through social evolution, and this comes from
greater freedom of thought, from bolder enquiry, from
broader experience, and from a scientific study of
the laws of causation. What “is”
becomes “right” from custom, but with our
yearnings for a higher ideal, sentiment slowly yields
to the logic of comparison, and, often wiping from
our eyes the sorrows over vanishing idols, we behold
broader vistas of human powers, possibilities, duties,
and destiny.

As the proper study of mankind is man, influenced
wholly by a desire to be useful to a society to which
I am indebted for the pleasures of civilised life,
I offer this brief volume as a comment on a phase of
the social condition of the times, and as my conclusions
regarding its interest for the future.

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CHAPTER I.

Theproblemstated.

The spread of moral restraint as a check.—­Predicted
by Malthus.—­The declining Birth-rate.—­Its
Universality.—­Most conspicuous in New Zealand.—­Great
increase in production of food.—­With rising
food rate falling birth-rate.—­Malthus’s
checks.—­His use of the term “moral
restraint.”—­The growing desire to
evade family obligations.—­Spread of physiological
knowledge.—­All limitation involves self
restraint.—­Motives for limitation.—­Those
who do and those who do not limit.—­Poverty
and the Birth-rate. Defectives prolific and propagate
their kind.—­Moral restraint held to include
all sexual interference designed to limit families.—­Power
of self-control an attribute of the best citizens.—­Its
absence an attribute of the worst.—­Humanitarianism
increases the number and protects the lives of defectives.—­The
ratio of the unfit to the fit.—­Its dangers
to the State.—­Antiquity of the problem.—­The
teaching of the ancients.—­Surgical methods
already advocated.

A century has passed since Malthus made his immortal
contribution to the supreme problem of all ages and
all people, but the whole aspect of the population
question has changed since his day. The change,
however, was anticipated by the great economist, and
predicted in the words:—­“The history
of modern civilisation is largely the history of the
gradual victory of the third check over the two others”
(vide Essay, 7th edition, p. 476). The
third check is moral restraint and the two others
vice and misery.